DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 7: Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights #1

A mere two months after Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire, a second DC/Marvel crossover featuring the two characters hit the stands, this one featuring the actual Batman, Bruce Wayne, rather than his temporary fill-in, Jean-Paul Valley. 

I thought it was the better of the two comics, and not simply because of the fact that it was what a reader might expect from a crossover of the two characters. The creative team also seemed better suited to the task, with the art especially being of a magnitude greater than that of the previous comic, at least according to my own personal tastes.

That creative team was writer Chuck Dixon, pencil artist John Romita Jr. and inker Klaus Janson.

By 1994, Dixon was both a prolific Punisher writer and a prolific Batman writer, and thus an ideal choice for a book in which the pair cross paths with one another. While I've never read his Punisher output, I have read a lot of Dixon's Batman comics (and those featuring other members of the Bat-Family, particularly from his long run on the first Robin ongoing). 

While not my favorite Batman writer (that would have been, at the time, probably Alan Grant), and never one for particularly inspired, imaginative, wild stories, Dixon was still an incredibly solid comics writer, a stalwart whose name on a book guaranteed a certain level of competency and quality. 

I always thought he excelled at coming up with plots for his heroes to challenge and foil, often with interesting crimes that seemed perfect for action movies (And yes, as a fan of his work, it saddens me that his personal politics seem to have alienated him from much of the mainstream industry, and lead to him working on truly bizarre comics like 2016's Clinton Cash: The Graphic Novel, a comics adaptation of Peter Schweizer's election cycle hit book). 

JRJR was an extremely familiar presence at Marvel Comics and had drawn Punisher War Journal, but this comic was his very first time drawing a DC Comics character officially. That was, in and of itself, rather exciting at the time.

And as for Klaus Janson, not only was he a frequent JRJR collaborator, but his work with Frank Miller on 1986's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns meant his was a name every Batman fan would know. 

So the art, which was colored by Christie Scheele, was obviously great, and the intense, dynamic cover of the two characters wrestling the pouring rain you see above is but a small taste.

Romita's drawing of the lead characters' figures are big, blocky and imposing...muscular, but with a sense of animated grace about them. His many mobster characters that populate the panels of the book are similarly big and bulky, with jagged edges to their suits and faces.

Under Janson's heavy inks, there's a tactile sense of grit to the art, and lots of blackness, from busy crosshatching to the rings around the stalactites in the Batcave to the wrinkles and shadows on the suits to the driving black rain of the climactic encounter.

Dixon's script gives a few great opportunities to really show off the Romita and Janson art, too, and they do not waste it.

Both characters are introduced in interesting splash spreads that require the reader to turn the open book from the standard horizontal orientation to a vertical one (no easy feat with a 1,000-page hardcover omnibus!) and read them that way, not unlike a pin-up in an old girly magazine.

The Punisher is introduced first, in a low angle standing atop some crates, a series of muzzle flashes and arcs of spent bullet casings emanating from the guns he has in both hands (They look like uzis to me, although he calls them "MACs" in narration later in the story; are those different things? I am not a gun person). 

JRJR's Frank Castle is bigger and thicker than Barry Kitson's was, and his face is covered in stubble and shadow. A strip of two inset panels along the bottom of the image of Castle keep it from being a true two-page splash; these panels feature regular Batman supporting characters Harvey Dent, Renee Montoya and Commissioner Gordon. 

Batman appears a few pages later, in similar fashion, although he's on the "bottom" of the spread, with a strip of panels above him. He's shown leaping into action, seemingly falling from the sky, with his hands outstretched like claws (and his fingers looking particularly, peculiarly flat, as JRJR tends to draw hands), his face and cape all black.

Later in the book, at the climax, when the pair come to blows for the second time, there's another two-page spread requiring one to turn the book to see it right-side up, featuring The Punisher punching Batman in the face.

I'm not sure about the image, as it affords the moment of biggest impact in the entire story to that particular blow in a fight, and it's not exactly the most dramatic moment of their conflict. It also devotes all that comic page real estate to a moment in which Castle "wins" the fight with Batman, although in both of the instances in which they fight one another in this book, Dixon's script makes clear that Batman would ultimately be victorious in a hand-to-hand fight with Castle (Actually, Lake of Fire also presumed the same about a fight between Punisher and that Batman, although the Punisher won the conflict by resorting to using a gun and a bit of trickery). 

It's perhaps worth pausing to consider JRJR's Batman, as this was his first time drawing the character (He would of course get another crack at the character during his 2016-2020ish stint at DC Comics, where he drew the first arc of writer Scott Snyder's All-Star Batman).

This is, of course, Batman in his "classic" costume, blue and gray with a form-fitting utility belt and a yellow circle around his bat-emblem (Batman would debut his new, all-black, brief-less costume the following year; that's what he would be wearing in his next Marvel crossover, a 1995 team-up with Spider-Man). I say "blue" of course, but it may look black to you, given how many lines Romita and Janson use, and how heavy the inks are; it does appear to be the same color as The Punisher's costume in this crossover, so I guess one could say they are both blue-black or, perhaps, comic book black.

JRJR's Batman is as big and imposing as his Punisher, but, in the few instances where we see him with his cape unfurled and flying behind him, he's also a bit more lithe and athletic, his waist looking almost comically slim below his huge barrel chest.

On the ears front, JRJR is on the longer side of the spectrum, which was the fashion at the time. Unusually for many Batman artists, however, his bat-ears are very thick at the base, forming two big black triangles atop his head.

As for Dixon's plot, it's pretty straightforward, and somewhat perfunctory, basically maneuvering the pair into a rainy Gotham City alleyway so they can hit one another and focus on their differences in crime-fighting philosophy in as perfect a test case as possible: Unrepentant mass murderer The Joker, put a bullet in his head or beat him up and take him to Arkham?

There's no big supervillain plot like Jigsaw's plan to turn the Gotham City reservoir into a lake of fire as in Lake of Fire, nor is there any focus on the interior lives of the characters, as with Valley's struggling with his delusions, and the conflict between his religious programming and his inherited crime-fighting mission. 

There's also, perhaps surprisingly, little real connective tissue between Deadly Knights and Lake of Fire. The characters make passing references to it (The Punisher noting that Batman's fighting style seems as different as his costume, for example, or Batman noting that The Punisher was in Gotham while he was "absent"). It obviously doesn't matter now that the two comics are collected back-to-back in the omnibus, but one could easily have read Deadly Knights in 1994 without ever having read Lake of Fire. 

We open with The Punisher in a massive firefight with generic gangsters in a Gotham City paint factory, his narration telling us he's returned to the city looking for Jigsaw, who never returned to New York as he had expected. Just as Castle is about to execute the last surviving gunman, Batman lands on the back of his head and they fight for a few pages.

"Something different here," Castle narrates. "Last time I was in Gotham this guy was a reckless brawler. Now he seems more skilled. Something refined about him."

Batman, meanwhile, is somewhat dismissive of The Punisher's abilities: "Punisher's tough. Strong. At heart he's just a brawler. All rage and brute strength." 

Though The Punisher gets in a few hits, including breaking a crate over Batman's head, Batman is in the process of throwing him across the room when the burning building collapses, and The Punisher escapes.

Meanwhile, Jigsaw, now drawn with his face bandaged up like a mummy, the work of "the best plastic surgeon that extortion could buy" in the words of his new partner The Joker, is trying to consolidate power around himself, and become the new leader of Gotham's criminal underworld. 

It is perhaps here worth noting that JRJR's Jigsaw looks entirely different from Kitson's. He's a great deal smaller, his hair far longer and shaggier (and a different color, although I suppose that's between the colorists), and he's lost the weird metal neck brace he had seemed to be wearing. 

As for The Joker, I really like JRJR's version, which manages to convey a full range of emotions through the eyes and brows alone, despite the smile being fixed. 

Dixon writes The Joker more as a typical gangland figure than he's usually portrayed, even if a crazy one with something of a schtick. Here he's not as wild or theatrical as in most of his other appearances, even those that Dixon himself had written. And there's no real plan that he's executing here, either; he's simply working to help Jigsaw consolidate power because...well, because Dixon wanted both title characters' archenemies in the relatively short, 45-ish page story, one assumes. 

While the two vigilantes pursue parallel investigations—and their respective computer-savvy sidekicks Micro and Robin have a computer fight, leading to this immortal panel—they both end up in a nightclub with The Joker, Jigsaw, a local crime boss and a whole bunch of generic guys with suits and guns, leading to a big, long 12-page fight scene ("The caped choirboy is holding his own, but he's throwing fists in a firefight," The Punisher observes).

At the end, the crime-fighters end up facing one another's villains, which means The Punisher putting a gun in The Joker's face and saying, "I've got all the therapy you need right here, comedian."

Batman, of course, would appear just before Castle could pull the trigger, leading first to a brief argument, and then that splash of The Punisher decking Batman.

A short fight ensues, in which Dixon has Batman assure us he could totally kick Castle's ass, if so inclined: "I let you have that one because you probably think I deserved it," he says, and when Castle throws another punch, Batman catches his fist and tosses him into a pile of boxes. "I said one...Don't test me, Castle."

Batman threatens him that if The Punisher ever comes to Gotham City again he'll see him locked up with "the other murderers," but seems awfully complacent about The Punisher's last few nights of killing a dozen or two guys in his city, and, rather uncharacteristically, seems content to just let The Punisher go (To be fair to Dixon, he had run out of his allotted pages).  

The Punisher, meanwhile, gets the last word in, but otherwise slinks away. And, to date anyway, has obeyed Batman's command and never returned to Gotham. 

This would be the pair's final meeting...unless you count an off-panel scene in JLA/Avengers, wherein the Justice League, visiting the Marvel Universe, are apparently delayed in their mission by some 20 minutes when Batman stops to beat up The Punisher. But, again, that was off panel.

If Deadly Knights was what we might expect a DC/Marvel crossover of the mid-1990s to be—two popular, top-tier headliners with interestingly opposing philosophies running headlong into one another by a creative team perfectly suited to the occasion—the next collaboration between the two publishers was anything but. 

Which isn't to say it wasn't interesting, of course, just not predictable.

Next: 1995's Darkseid Vs. Galactus: The Hunger #1

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 6: Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1

While none of the prose pieces in the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus answer the question of why, exactly, the two publishers stopped collaborating on crossover comics after 1982's Marvel and DC Present Featuring the Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans #1, a new piece by editor Mike Carlin explains why they eventually resumed a decade and change later.

Carlin's essay notes that several editors and writers had moved from Marvel Comics to DC Comics, including himself, Archie Goodwin, Denny O'Neil, Louise Simonson and Roger Stern, a fact that diminished the sense of "Us Vs. Them" that had previously existed between the publishers.

Additionally, this generation of editors and creators were, unlike those that preceded them, genuine fans of the superhero characters they had grown up reading about, and thus approached something like, say, the possibility of Batman and Spider-Man teaming up for the first time with the same sort of enthusiasm their readers might, rather than simply as a money-making venture.

What Carlin doesn't explain, however, is why in the world DC and Marvel finally resumed with this particular crossover, 1994's Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire. It is here that while reading the collection I really started to miss all of those introductions and forewords from earlier in the book, those original to the omnibus and those reprinted from 1991's Crossover Classics, which shared a great deal of behind-the-scenes information and provided a sense of what the publishers were thinking with particular character pairings. 

Of course, both Batman and The Punisher were popular characters. The former perennially so, and the latter was, at that point, not too far removed from the zenith of his popularity, I believe.

Both were urban, street-level vigilantes whose focus was often fighting real-world crime, but they had vastly different, opposing philosophies on how to do so. Batman refused to ever take a life, a position he held to such a zealous extreme that he would often risk his own life to save that of unrepentant murderers like The Joker, who he knew would certainly go on to kill again and again. The Punisher happily, regularly took the lives of the criminals he faced, racking up a body count that could probably eclipse that of any mass murderer, The Joker included (At this point in the character's history, though, Marvel was playing the Punisher as a hero, if a deadly one, and not the unrepentant psychopath that 21st century writers like Garth Ennis would depict him as).

The catch with this particular crossover, however, is that The Punisher wouldn't be meeting the "real" Batman at all, but the temporary replacement Batman, Jean-Paul Valley, the Batman ally codenamed Azrael who would go on to assume the mantle of the bat during the 1993-1994 trilogy of Batman events, Knightfall, Knightquest and KnightsEnd. (As for Bruce Wayne, he was busy elsewhere; after Bane broke his back in the climax of Knightfall, he was relegated to a wheelchair but nevertheless pursued the kidnappers of his girlfriend at the time, Dr. Shondra Kinsolving.)

It's not entirely clear to me why Marvel Comics would necessarily want a crossover with the substitute Batman rather than the real deal or, you know, any other DC character at all, but then, this was long before I paid attention to things like sales charts, so I couldn't even guess how popular the "AzBats" Batman was at the time, and if the Punisher crossover sold well or not. (Ask Mike Sterling, maybe.)

It is clear reading this in this collection and then, immediately afterwards, reading its same-year sequel Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights, that the publishers must have planned both comics around the same time, always intending to follow up the Punisher's meeting with the Jean-Paul Valley Batman with another story in which he met the Bruce Wayne Batman (despite the fact that the books have two entirely different creative teams).

Rather late in the game of Lake of Fire, The Joker appears, coming to the aid of Punisher villain Jigsaw (Who, as far as I can tell, was, like, the only Punisher villain, given Frank Castle's habit of executing his foes).  The Joker is only in five panels of the entire book, presumably because he was being teased for a lengthier, more substantial role in the sequel. 

Though Lake of Fire was the first of what would end up being about a dozen such DC/Marvel crossovers in the next half dozen years or so, it doesn't read as too terribly special a book. It's only 48 pages long, the shortest DC/Marvel crossover to date, and thus lacks the larger scope and more epic feel of the original round of inter-company crossovers. 

It's also somewhat confined in focus, mostly just featuring the two title characters, and not doing much of the way in terms of exploring their home cities, supporting casts, interior lives or even their differing crime-fighting philosophies (Although it's worth noting, I suppose, that this more violent, more brutal version of Batman isn't quite as opposite the Punisher that the Bruce Wayne Batman is; while Jean-Paul Valley and Frank Castle find themselves coming to blows by the end of their team-up, Valley is far more sympathetic to Castle than Wayne would have been).

As for the creators, the publishers chose writer Denny O'Neil and artists Barry Kitson and James Pascoe.

O'Neil was obviously a solid choice, having worked extensively as both a writer and editor for both companies. He had written both Batman and Punisher before and was, at the time of this book's publication, the editor of DC's Batman line. In fact, he had created the Jean-Paul Valley character (with artist Joe Quesada in 1992's Batman: Sword of Azrael) and obviously had a great deal of affection for him, going on to pen a 100-issue run on an Azrael solo title after the KnightsEnd conclusion. 

Kitson had likewise drawn for both publishers at that point in his career but wasn't particularly associated with either character (O'Neil must have thought the two worked well together, though, as Kitson would go on to draw a large chunk of that Azrael series). 

Though I appreciate Kitson's talents and have read and enjoyed some of his later work, I can't say I was particularly dazzled with his work here. The book opens with a two-page spread set in hell, as it was being dreamed by Valley, who was raised and hypnotically programmed by the crypto-Christian cult the Order of St. Dumas (When he eventually starts to lose it in the Batman storyline, a process that seems well underway by the time this crossover is set during, he increasingly has visions of St. Dumas.)

"Draw hell" seems like a great, compelling prompt for an artist to get, affording them a chance to really go to town, but Kitson's splash is a let-down. His hell is cavernous, with seemingly naturally occurring pillars holding a roof aloft, while untold numbers of suffering humans fill the infinite space. But Kitson only draws about 15 of the people, including a busty lady in a torn dress reaching up and screaming and a muscular, pupil-less bald man reaching out and doing...something to another pair of figures, the rest of the horde simply suggested by a brown mass filling most of the cave, little circles here and there intimating heads. 

As far as comic book depictions of hell goes, it looks uninspired and, given the page real estate afforded the image, lazy. The book is not off to a great start.

Valley awakes from his dream, having fallen asleep in the Batcave, wearing his particularly uncomfortable-looking version of the Batsuit. He tells readers that the computers have intercepted and decoded a message from the Pentagon about a formula for rocket fuel that was stolen by an associate of a known Gotham criminal named Bressi. He dons his helmet and rushes into action. 

Meanwhile, a big man in a big overcoat is narrating in PG comic book tough guy language: "Few places are worse than New York. Gotham City is one. I'm here because it's where the trail of a mook named Jigsaw took me...It's cruddy. That's okay. I'm used to crud."

This is, of course, The Punisher, who gets in a barfight looking for information on Jigsaw and ends up getting a lead pointing him to a church downtown. The lead, coincidentally, comes from the guy who has the rocket fuel plans ("You seem real interested in what's in this case. Papers...maybe I'll like 'em as much as you").

Meanwhile Jigsaw, who Kitson draws as a particularly big guy with a face like a quilt and a big, metal neck brace of some kind, explains his plans for the readers' benefit: The new rocket fuel has the ability to ignite water, and Jigsaw plans to use it on the city reservoir and then charge the city an astronomical fee to repair the damages and, I don't know, restore the reservoir somehow...?

The sub-title of the book thus has a double meaning, referring both metaphorically to hell and literally to what Jigsaw plans to do to Gotham's water supply. 

The church lead turns out to be a trap, and The Punisher is splashed with drugged holy water and the building is set on fire. The new Batman comes to the rescue, bursting through a stained-glass window, and getting The Punisher to safety.

After introductions, and The Punisher convincing Batman that he needs him to track down Jigsaw ("I know Jigsaw...How he lives, thinks...breathes."), and some threats (Batman: "We are allies until Bressi is caught. Then— You become prey." Punisher: "Well...Somebody does."), they climb into the Batmobile and drive to a steam bath full of Russian criminal types in towels for a fight scene.

The Punisher manages to slip away from Batman, and they continue their investigation separately. In the end, The Punisher throws Jigsaw out of a window, and Batman is swinging by just in time to catch the villain, who he leaves tied up (For, it turns out, The Joker to discover and free). 

Then it's time for the big fight, which I guess O'Neil makes feel somewhat unexpected by placing it after the cooperation portion of the team-up. It only lasts three pages before The Punisher finally pulls a gun and puts a couple of bullets into Batman's armored chest. That doesn't stop the new Dark Knight either, so The Punisher pulls a gas grenade from Batman's utility belt and detonates it in his face, allowing him to retreat, but not before offering the defeated Batman rather lame goodbye: "Hey, man...I cheated, okay?"

And that concludes the first DC/Marvel team-up in many years...although, as I said earlier, it wasn't exactly the end of Batman/Punisher story. The two would crossover again almost immediately, but next time it would be Bruce Wayne in the cape and cowl.

Next: 1994's Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights

Review: Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Hearts of Darkness

Hey, I remember this one! It was an extra-long prestige format comic published in 1991. My grandfather and my siblings were shopping downtown, back when my hometown's downtown still had stores in it, including a comics shop, and my little brother, then considering maybe getting into comics, asked my grandfather to buy it for him. My grandfather, for whom comic books used to cost a dime, was taken aback by the $4.95 price tag (which was actually steep even for 1991), but ultimately relented.

I wonder what he would make of this new trade paperback edition, which costs $15.99; hell, having read the 1991 one-shot, I couldn't imagine how Marvel could get away with that price tag. Turns out they did so by including a sequel I didn't know existed until I started reading this new edition, the 1994 Dark Design (plus a five-page Marvel Age interview with Hearts pencil artist John Romita Jr).

The premise of Hearts of Darkness was that the three characters whose names came before the sub-title--Ghost Rider, Wolverine and Punisher--represented a new* breed of hero with levels of darkness in their hearts that pushed them so close to evil that the demon prince Blackheart thought he could tempt the three of them to assist him in assassinating his father, Mephisto who was, of course, one of Marvel's various Satan analogues.

It was probably just a happy coincidence that, in the early 1990s, these were also three of Marvel's most popular characters. Writer Howard Mackie certainly knew what he was doing in terms of proposing a comic book.

It's an extremely simple, straightforward story. Blackheart invites Danny Ketch, Frank Castle and Logan to the town of Christ's Crown--apparently named because of a hill surrounded with thick thickets of thorn bushes nearby--via letters promising them information they might want, signing the missives B.H.

All three show up on the same day at the same boarding house, run by a woman whose little girl Lucy is extremely trusting and takes to each of the dark, scowling men immediately. Her mother portentously notes her daughter strange trusting nature, and how it's almost like there isn't a bad bone in her body.

That night, Blackheart reveals himself to the three anti-heroes simultaneously, and, when they all tell him to get bent--they may occasionally kill their foes, or, in Frank's case, constantly kill their foes, but that doesn't mean they are going to sign up to work with the a devil (There's a lot of hair-splitting and semi-silly speechifying about how they all walk the razor's edge without falling over the cliff, and other such metaphor mixing).

To try to convince them, Blackheart snatches up Lucy, the only pure soul in Christ's Crown, and takes over the minds of the rest of the city, all of whom have enough sin in them that they can control them. He also steals Danny's bike.

Together, the three popular badasses are able to claw, shoot and hot-chain their way through hordes of little frog-like demons, journey to hell, turn Blackheart into gory chewing gum and save Lucy.

The chief pleasure of the book, then as now, was John Romita Jr.'s artwork, inked by a perfectly compatible Klaus Janson. I really loved his Blackheart design. He looks a bit like a giant, humanoid porcupine, with a head, shoulders and back covered in a mane of bristling spines. He has a tail, bit red eyes and no mouth; additionally, Romita and Janson give him what look like thorns all over his skin. It's a sharp, uncomfortable, jittery, anxious design. It's a hell of a devil, really (I wish that's what the version in the first Ghost Rider movie looked like; it might have gone a ways towards improving that film).

The version of Mephisto who appears here was pretty unfamiliar to me, looking like a gigantic, bloated humanoid with large breasts (and long, string-like nipples), and a vaguely avian head that looks like a primitive ceremonial mask of a bird. There's something of a primitive fertility goddess statue about him. He never gets up off his haunches, but is shown big enough to grab the mooshed-up Blackheart in his hand and throw him into his mouth.

JRJR draws the three title characters exceptionally well, of course. I particularly liked seeing how small and stocky his Wolverine looked; perhaps it was the influence of the films, or simply the slackening of Big Two style guides over the decades, but Wolverine tends to be as tall whoever is drawing him these days wants him to be, so it was kinda refreshing to see a little Wolverine standing next to a giant Frank Castle.

Dark Design is...not very good. Mackie writes it, but Ron Garney pencils and Al Milgrom inks. I like both artists, and Garney in particular has evolved in style into something I quite like now, but back in 1994 he was very much working in a 1990s Jime Lee-like style. Unlike Hearts, this sequel doesn't age well at all, and seems to be, visually at least, inextricably linked to the time in which it was published.

Blackheart has returned to Christ's Crown, and is now sort of insane. He has somehow transformed and twisted the town into a goth sci-fi big city, and enslaved portions of the population, who are called The Corrupt. They wear dumb spandex costumes, have visible black veins, and wield weird laser guns.

Lucy, now a tween or teen, is protected by a small and dwindling band of rebels. I'm not sure why Blackheart didn't just take over their minds too, but it may have something to do with her burgeoning psychic powers, with which she summons Ghost Rider, Wolvie and Punisher back to town. After killing their way through The Corrupt, they take on Blackheart again, this time interrupting his wedding to Lucy (Ew).

He gets what he needs from her, though: Her innocent blood on the tip of his knife, with which he seemingly kills his father.

As I said, Garney's style here is pretty much just default early '90s superhero art. His Blackheart lacks all the pointy parts of JRJR's, looks smaller and wears a coat; he reminded me of an extremely off-model Nightcrawler throughout. He draws the weird bird version of Mephisto, but with a few alterations, like some sort of make-up or mask on his face, and huger, blacker nipples.

Wolverine has traded his brown and yellow costume in for his blue and gold one at this point, but Ghost Rider and Punisher have barely changed (the latter traded in his white boots for black ones, but that's the most drastic wardrobe change he made during the years between these comics). The coloring, by Paul Mounts, is much more garish and nauseous in the second story, but that likely has a lot to do with the changing technology of comic book coloring of the day. There were many more new options suddenly available, and colorists went for them.

I'm not sure what the originals cost these days, should you find them in back-issue bins, but I'd be shocked if they had increased in value so much that you couldn't find them there for cheaper than the cost of this collection. On the other hand, new collections are easier to buy. If you really want to. Like I said, this is a nice showcase of JRJR's art from a previous stage in his career, and serves as a nice time capsule of a certain time in Marvel comics history, but it's not exactly literature.



*Created between 1972 and 1974, these characters weren't exactly brand-new in 1991, although they were definitely among the second generation of Marvel characters. This Ghost Rider was introduced just around the time this comic was originally published though.

Thoughts on Daredevil season two (episode one)

So dumb.

•I still really, really dislike TV Daredevil's costume, and Netflix showed a pretty thorough visual recap of the first season before the first episode of the second season, giving me another chance to see that original, all-black, non-costume costume right before his big, dumb, bulky body armor suit. Because I am a masochist, my friend and I re-watched the 2003 Daredevil film shortly after watching the first season, and the one thing it did better than the TV show was that it had a better Daredevil costume (especially the cowl).

Now wouldn't Charlie Cox look great in this outfit?

I've said it before, but I'll say it again since I'm back on the subject. I'd prefer a TV Daredevil costume much closer to the one he's currently wearing in the comics, all black with some red highlights (gloves, boots) and a cowl more like the one Ben Affleck rocked.

•The opening sequence, in which a gang of ski-masked wearing, gun-toting thieves who apparently just robbed a silver briefcase store but neglected to arrange for a getaway car are taken down one-by-one by an unseen, off-screen Daredevil is pretty fantastic introduction to Daredevil and his ninja skills.

•I wonder if they are eventually going to address the fact that Daredevil is basically a sadistic crazy person with a semi-split personality. The way Charlie Cox plays Matt Murdock, he seems like such a nice, charming sweet guy, but when he justifies his vigilante activities to Elden Henson's Foggy in their first scene together, he brings up an instance where he stops a drunken wife-beater from attempting to murder his spouse, who they were unable to fully protect simply through their lawyering. Murdock notes that he put the bad guy in the hospital, after breaking both his arms and inflicting some other grievous injury...was it a cracked sternum? Something like that?

I mean, way to go saving the day and all, and I'm sure the serial abuser deserved to get a taste of what he was dishing out to his wife, but Jesus Matt, did you have to break both arms? Doesn't breaking one limb kinda make the point?

•It's pretty impossible these days, even when one doesn't read the articles under the headlines on the comics sites noting who has been cast as who in what show, to avoid learning details about shows like this (and even if I did stay off the Internet all together, I would have seen the ads for the show prominently featuring the two new characters). But I really kinda wish I didn't know The Punisher was going to be in this. Because they spent a significant time building up the threat this episode, with the climax of that build-up probably being the revelation that it wasn't a gang or squad or team of people using military-grade hardware to slaughter various Hell's Kitchen's gangs by the dozens, but that it was "just one guy."

Maybe they could have mo-capped Bernthal and had Tim Bradstreet draw a CGI Punisher over him...?

•I'm not entirely sure how I feel about Jon Bernthal's Punisher, as he's not really on-screen all that much. The Punisher I see in my mind's eye these days is the one from Garth Ennis' Max run, which means something of a cross between an ogre and a middle-aged Clint Eastwood. This Punisher is certainly being portrayed as something close to Ennis' maniac-serial-killer version from the Max comics series, which reinforced that image of him in my mind before appeared on-screen.

I'm not sure who looks like that Punisher--Scott Eastwood with some Lord of The Rings-style camera trickery to make him look three feet taller than Daredevil? Ron Perleman?--Bernthal but seemed too normal-sized, rather than the bigger-than-life force of nature he's portrayed as here.

•Boy, do they really sell The Punisher as a bat-shit insane, slasher-movie villain, as opposed to the anti-hero, guy-who's-willing-to-cross-that-line vigilante of the previous movies or the pre-Ennis (and some post-Ennis) comics. The Punisher I've read comics about certainly wouldn't be above torturing bad guys or anything, but that whole sequence in his lair, with victims hung on hooks with sides of beef, all sorts of industrial flesh-cutting equipment in the next room?

If the Punisher-cave was simply more poorly lit, or at least had flickering light bulbs, it would seem more like a place for Leatherface to hang out than The Punisher.

•I was actually pretty surprised that he and Daredevil had a fight within the first episode, especially considering the build-up before Wilson Fisk ever appeared in the first season. Their fight was pretty fantastic at the outset--I really liked the way Daredevil essentially moved him across the rooftop while they fought--but once we got to the slow-motion kick, it lost its momentum (Daredevil screaming like Tarzan before tackling Punisher from above wasn't a very sneaky ninja move, either).

•I was a little surprised by the fact that Punisher held his own so well against Daredevil in a fistfight, but, again, that may be simply because I'm bringing with me my own perceptions and impressions from reading comics about these guys, where one is a master ninja with super-senses and the other is just a big guy with guns. We haven't learned much about this Punisher yet, so far all I know he was trained by Stick or The Hand or discovered the lost city of K'un-L'un.

Two not-really-reviews: The Punisher Vol. 1 and New Avengers Vol. 1: Everything Dies

I borrowed these two collections from my library a few months ago, and read them both, with the intention of sitting down to review them at some point. In both cases, I kept putting doing so off—not out of a reluctance to write about them or out of procrastination, but simply because it seemed like I always had something else more timely or more pressing to write about, and thus they kept getting pumped further down the old review pile.

In the case of the Punisher book, I did pick it up and sit before my laptop with plans to review here on my blog one weekend afternoon, but then realized that despite having read it only a month or so before that, I had completely forgotten just about everything in it it (The Punisher grew a beard, I think? And there was a lady in it?).

So instead of writing about it that afternoon, I re-read it instead. And then, a few weeks later, I had once again forgotten just about everything that occurred within the story.

At that point, I just gave up and returned the book to the library. I figured if I could read the same graphic novel twice in the course of a summer and remember so little about it's plot, characters or overall quality, well, that fact was a sort of review in and of itself, wasn't it?

Here's all I remember thinking about the book:

1.) I was conflicted about the beard. On the one hand, Frank Castle has that whole military thing going on, so he seems like he might be the kind of guy who shaves every single day, and he even still makes his bed really well.  On the other hand, as a guy who only cares about killing criminals, maybe a beard would be a nice visual signifier that he puts criminal-killing above all else in his life, even personal grooming. Maybe he should have a gigantic beard like one of those guys in that duck show, long, crazy hair with twigs in it, and maybe some flies buzzing around his head that he never takes time to bathe, because he's just too busy killing bad guys.

2.) I think he wore a goofy Punisher shirt that looks like he bought it from a comic shop's clothing rack; like, it had a white skull/Punisher logo with a sorta wash effect on it, rather than wearing, like his superhero costume (In that respect, it reminded me of the Punisher shirt worn in the second of the three terrible Punisher movies). This seemed like a misguided attempt to make the character slightly more realistic, which is just silly; a Vietnam Vet who has killed 45,000 gangsters or so in a city full of superheroes makes The Punisher maybe the least realistic Marvel character of all. Dude's far below Man-Thing and Ghost Rider and Silver Surfer on my list of Marvel characters that could maybe possibly exist in the real world somehow someday. (Looking at the cover above though, maybe it was the Rucka Woman who apprentices with The Punisher who wore the lame Punisher merch shirt? Hey, I said I could barely remember the book!)

3.) Writer Greg Rucka put that same character he writes into every comic he writes in the book: The extremely competent, extremely tough woman haunted by personal demons and blessed with model good looks. I guess it's cool that Rucka is single-handedly trying to introduce as many "strong female characters" into comics as possible, but it's weird he keeps introducing the same one over and over, only varying her hair color and name.

4.) The Punisher fights The Vulture at some point, and The Vulture is not the old bald guy in green, but a young man with a full head of hair who wears red. All I really remember about this encounter is that I really hate hate hated Brian Hitch's cover for the issue that had the Vulture/Punisher fight in it.

Look at Hitch's Vulture:

He's just, like, a guy. In a red track suit. With some streamers on his jacket. And these streamers allow him to fly, I guess...? Or maybe he has superpowers, and the streamers are just for show? What a dumb cover image.

But it was just Hitch's version of the Vulture. The one inside, the one drawn by artist Marco Checcetto (whom I remember nothing of, so he was neither spectacular nor terrible), had, like, scary eyes and claws and fuller wings and looked like a super-villain monster man.

Did any of you guys make it farther into Rucka's Punisher run than I did, and manage to maintain memory of it? Is it worth starting over again some day, and reading all of it? I kinda want to get to the War Zone conclusion, where I think he fights the Marvel Universe, but not sure it's worth reading too many boring comics to get to it.

As for the New Avengers book, I really rather liked that one, but I let so much time elapse between reading it and considering reviewing it that I felt I'd have to re-read it to do even a half-way decent job of reviewing it, and it wasn't the sort of book I felt like re-reading (Not when I have sooo many other books, comic and otherwise, to read at the moment).

It collected the first story arc or so from the re-relaunched New Avengers book by Jonathan Hickman, Steve Epting and company, part of Marvel's "Marvel NOW!" initiative. It's not really an Avengers book, and it doesn't support its title very well (The more recent Mighty Avengers seems better-suited to the New Avengers title, given that for the bulk of Brian Michael Bendis' eight-years or so on the previous two volumes of New Avengers, they were meant to be the "street-level" super-team...and to have Luke Cage in it).

It's really an Illuminati title, the unofficial name given to the cadre of Marvel smart-guys who Bendis retconned into having been secretly running the Marvel Universe (Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, Namor, Dr. Strange, Professor X). But I guess The Illuminati or The New Illuminati or Marvel's Illuminati just don't sound like proper titles for Marvel comic book (I like the sound of the word Superlluminati, though)

Hickman introduces some interesting changes to the line-up, with The Black Panther joining (after flirting with previous incarnations), Captain America joining for a little while until the others realized Cap just isn't an amoral enough asshole to hang with them and, finally,  X-Man/Avenger Hank "Beast" McCoy replacing the temporarily dead Charles Xavier.

The storyline of Bendis' involving these guys that I remember most clearly was an instance that lead into Secret Invasion, which I remember pretty clearly only because it made The Skrulls look like the good guys: The Illuminati detonate one of the Skrull's giant Star Wars ships and kill, like, thousands of Skrulls.

And that's sort of the quite dark gray area Hickman positions the team in. He's come up with a terrible moral dillema for them to face. In order to save the Earth, they must continuously destroy other Earths (wiping out the population of each), given some kind of cosmic thing where parallel Earths keep being drawn toward collision with the Marvel Earth. If they do nothing, both their Earth and the other Earth will be destoryed; if they destroy the other Earth, at least their Earth will survive, but at the cost of another whole planet.

Throughout this volume, they have to wrestle with that decision over and over, but circumstances tend to keep sparing them from having to actually make it. It's an interesting, unique conflict, and one well-suited to these particular super-heroes, some of whom aren't the sort who always find a third way when faced with two bad options (Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic in particular, given their roles as the villains of Civil War).

Infinity Gems, Thanos and, I'm sure, the already in-progress Infinity crossover/event figure heavily in the title's future, but I liked that first volume just fine, and was sorta surprised that I did, having no real strong feelings about the creators involved or the characters as a group (They've generally only appeared in the most talky, least exciting issues of Bendis' books).

I was sorta surprised by Mr. Fantastic's presence though, as he and the rest of the FF are lost in time and space in Fantastic Four and FF, two books being published concurrently with New Avengers, although perhaps they're actually set before or after the events of this title. 

Twenty more-or-less random thoughts that occurred to me while reading The List

1.) It's just called The List, not Dark Reign: The List. I thought that was a little weird, given that the individual special all shipped with overly complicated titles, like Dark Reign: The List—The Avengers, Dark Reign: The List—Wolverine and so on. They put the words "The List" in what looks like some kind of Dark Reign font, though.


2.) I honestly can't tell you how much I hate this cover:
Not because I'm bashful about expressing my hatred for it, but simply because I can't quantify that hate. It's a lot of hate though.

Here we see five random Marvel characters more or less milling around in various half-assed poses, a list of names hovering behind them (Please note: That is not actually Norman Osborn's list, which is eight items long and shown a couple of times throughout the course of the book.) Also note that Wolverine, who is barely even in the book (despite having his name on one of the specials collected), is wearing the wrong costume, and The Punisher seems even more off-model, forgetting to put his gloves on.


3.) The book is pretty much a perfect sampler platter of the Marvel Universe circa 2009. Here's the creative roster, for example: Brian Michael Bendis, Andy Diggle, Matt Fraction, Jonathan Hickman, Rick Remender, Greg Pak, Jason Aaron, Dan Slott, Marko Djurdjevic, Billy Tan, Alan Davis, Ed McGuinness, John Romita Jr., Ben Oliver, Esad Ribic, Adam Kubert and others. Additionally, many of the characters are in modern, assuredly short-lived iterations (The X-Men are on their little island Utopia, Daken is running around as Wolverine, Bruce Banner can't turn into the Hulk, and is mentoring his son Skaar, etc). Some stories are better than others, of course, and there are a variety of art styles, but overall it's not a bad way to check in with the Marvel Universe as it currently stands.


4.) Marvel just recently released a book entitled Brian Michael Bendis: 10 Years at Marvel, celebrating the anniversary of the company's most successful and influential writer. So you know Bendis has been at this—making comics in general, making Marvel comics specifically—for a really, really long time now. So I was amused to see the first two pages of his Avengers special:
As long as Bendis has been writing these damn things, he still doesn't seem to have been able to figure out an effective way to put one of his very Bendisian conversations into a comic book page layout. That, or Ares is standing on one leg throughout that conversation for some reason.


5.) Fun fact: Lexapro is the brand name for the drug Escitalopram, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, which is used primarily for the treatment of depression (although it is also often prescribed for anxiety disorders). I'm neither a doctor nor a psychiatrist, but as far as I know, it's not prescribed to paranoid schizophrenics. Spider-Man seems to be making a joke about Clint Barton/Hawkeye/Ronin II being paranoid, so Lexapro is a weird one to go with.


6.) Barton/Hawkeye/Ronin totally wants to kill Norman Osborn, for reasons not entirely clear to me based on this single story (He refers to the X-Men's little island as "a concentration camp," which doesn't seem much different then when they were confined to the Xavier mansion post-House of M, and is a lot less concentration camp-like than, say, Guantanamo Bay...did Hawkeye wanna kill Tony Stark or or Maria Hill or any U.S. presidents...?).

Some of the Avengers argue with Barton how killing is wrong. This story is written by the same man who wrote Secret Invasion, in which Barton advocated genocide against the Skrulls and killed a whole bunch of them himself. Everyone in the room with him in this scene were A-OK with killing Skrulls. I just don't get the moral compasses of Bendis' Avenger characters at all, as they're always changing without explanation, like a compass in a movie where the characters enter into some kind of screwy energy field or something, and the needle spins at random.

That said, while I understand the premise of "Dark Reign," the whys of it have never made any sense to me. Osborn was publicly known as a serial killer, and his redemptive act and the reason for his popularity in Secret Invasion was simply shooting the about-to-be-killed-anyway Skrull queen in the head before Wolverine could chop her head off or one of the other dozen heroes about to kill her killed her. If Secret Invasion was merely a miniseries devoted to making Osborn the new-new Nick Fury, Bendis really should have spent more time on him in the series, and shown him actually doing things that would make a reasonable case of his succeeding where Tony Stark failed (or, I don't know, maybe he just did a deal with Mephisto or Loki, and they changed Marvel continuity for him...maybe that will be part of Siege).

Wow, I got off topic real fast there, didn't I...?


7.) Norman Osborn kills 107 people in an explosion to send a message to Daredevil. That's a whole lot of civilians to just kind of kill randomly for pretty much no reason. The Daredevil story is the second one in the book, and it's the first of several times in which Osborn attempts to take out someone on his list, doesn't quite do it, and then just moves on. There's a frustrating amount of non-status quo changing, for a series all about an almost all-powerful Osborn attempting to change the status quo.


8.) I don't care for Billy Tan's artwork much. He draws one big, beefy Daredevil.


9.) I was dreading the Secret Warriors chapter, as I had little-to-no interest in the characters after meeting them in Secret Invasion, but it turned out to be a Nick Fury solo story, and, thanks to Hickman and McGuinness a pretty damn good one.


10.) I like how Fury breaks into Avengers Tower to get at Osborn, which Barton just did a few chapters ago, and he manages to do so much more effectively. It may just be a coincidence—not sure how much each writer knew about the other writers' plots—but the effect is a demonstration of how awesome Nick Fury is (and/or how relatively lame Barton is, I guess).


11.) Fury's own list is awesome, as is the fact that he has it all written down on a piece of paper and ready to show to Osborn, just in case the subject of lists comes up when they meet.


12.) I really like the way McGuinness draws Ares in his helmet:


13.) McGuinness does a lovely job of drawing Osborn making Green Goblin faces without his mask, quite effectively demonstrating that even though Osborn is supposedly reformed and in control, he's still essentially a crazy supervillain (Other writers usually demonstrate this by having Osborn yelling at himself or something a little more obvious). Poor show on the repeating image there though, McGuinness!

14.) I can't add anything of value to Abhay Khosla's discussion of the X-Men special, which I hope you've all read by now.

Although it is a pretty frustrating story. Osborn goes to the trouble of creating a weapon specifically designed to kill Namor, because Namor betrayed him by leaving his evil cabal (And how did that work, exactly? Osborn had a secret weapon behind a door to keep his reluctant allies in line, one so scary they couldn't quit. Yet Namor, Emma Frost and Doctor Doom have all since quit. Did they reveal what that weapon was? Did Osborn just never use it? If the Sentry's on his side, why not just have the Sentry beat these traitors up?). So Osborn has this monster weapon kill Atlanteans ("Hundreds are dead, if not thousands," Namor reports), and the monster ultimately attacks Namor and the X-Men. They kill it, and then Namor throws its severed head at Osborn and glowers at him.

And that's the end of that. Osborn lets Namor go, Namor leaves without trying to kill Osborn (despite the whole "hundreds are dead, if not thousands" thing).

That's pretty weird, isn't it? It's like the two enemies saw they only had a few pages left in that particular issue, and decided they would finish this later...maybe in a Siege book.


15.) Hey, if they ever get around to a Namor movie, I wonder if they'll be able to use the blue-skinned Atlanteans, or if moviegoers will just accuse them of biting off Avatar?



16.) I wonder if some of these stories will be re-collected elsewhere, perhaps grouped with the ongoing titles whose characters they feature. The Punisher issue, for example, is a pretty pivotal moment for the character, and what comes next in his own Marvel Universe book.


17.) This was my first exposure to the Bruce Banner/Skaar team. It seemed like a neat twist on the Banner/Hulk dynamic, with both personalities physically present at the same time and interacting with one another. I also liked how Pak played Banner as a sort of MacGyver-esque superhero (Has there been a Skaar, Hercules, Banner and Amadeus Cho team-up yet?). That said, I hated the art on this chapter, and I didn't understand the conflict or the resolution. I think Osborn "won," but I didn't understand how, or the goals of the participants.


18.) The Punisher story stood out as being one in which there is a clear winner and a clear loser. The Punisher gets throoughly killed in a way that's rare in superhero comics, with Daken literally slicing him into little pieces and leaving them as a bloody pile, removing any and all suspicion that The Punisher could somehow survive (Well, he does of course...the very next storyline in his personal monthly title was called, um, "FrankenCastle," and featured him as a Frankenstein's monster). I knew it was coming, and it was still something of a shock to see The Punisher finally get killed.

The more I thought about it though, the more unfortunate the issue seemed, like a bit of a lost opportunity. Marvel's only going to get so many chances to kill off The Punisher after all, and it would have been nice if he had a better death than being killed in a one-on-one fight with Wolverine's mohawk and tattoo-having son Daken. The Punisher's fought and beat and/or escaped from pretty much every superhero in The Marvel Universe multiple times by now, right? And it's Daken who finishes him off? It might have been more satisfying to see him run a gauntlet of Dark Avengers before Daken chopped him up, if not having a more unbeatable Avenger like Ares do him in.

This is another story that repeats something from earlier in the collection, in this case a fight with Daken. In the first chapter, we saw Barton take on and/or defeat most of the Dark Avengers—including Daken—before Ares ultimately captured him. If Hawkeye can take Daken and Daken can kill The Punisher, does that mean Hawkeye can wipe the floor with The Punisher? That doesn't quite sound right, does it...?


19.) Jason Aaron's Wolverine story is pretty fantastic. As I mentioned early, Wolvie just barely appears in it at all, and it's basically a team-up between the Grant Morrison-created Marvel Boy with the Grant Morrison-created Fantomex for a mission inside "The World," the Weapon-Plus factory from Morrison's New X-Men run. And surprise, surprise, Aaron writes both characters really, really well, making him one of the few people who can satisfyingly follow Morrison (Of course, this was only a single story, but it was still striking how much more closer to Morrison's Marvel Boy Aaron's was than, say, Bendis' first crack at the character was).

Maybe after Siege Bendis will retire from Marvel Universe-running, and they'll let Jason Aaron handle the gig for the next five or so year...?


20.) I was kind of shocked how good Adam Kubert's Spider-Man story was, particularly since the last time I saw his work it was pretty unimpressive. It's really too bad he can't keep a monthly schedule.

Ten things I learned from the Marvel Pets Handbook

1.) That horses—winged, horned or otherwise—are measured to their withers to determine their height. And the withers are, apparently, the highest point of a horse's shoulders, or where the two shoulder blades meet. I did not know that until I looked it up after reading this handbook.


2.) The Marvel multiverse may be even more complicated than the DC one. DC Comics used to get a lot of flack for how complicated their shared setting was, considering the fact that it consisted of alternate dimensions with alternate versions of the same characters, and that they were permeable enough that the Supermen of Earth-1 and Earth-2 were pals, and characters like Red Tornado and Black Canary could immigrate between the two. Prior to Crisis on Infinite Earths, they were designated by numbers or letters—Earth-4, Earth-S, Earth-X, etc.—and, after a few years of fiddling with it, it now seems like they're using just numbers, and that there are 52 different earths.

How many different Marvel Earth's are there? I don't know. The main Marvel Universe is usually referred to as the "616" universe, or "Earth-616." But in the handbook, other earths are referred to with this formula, and I have no idea what any of these are. Earth-78411, Earth-929, Earth-311, Earth-700089, Earth-691, Earth-148611...and so on. I'm not sure how the designated numbers are arrived at, but as you an see some are as long as six digits.

I imagine there's also a handbook that defines all of these, but I haven't got that one.


3.) NEXTWAVE is apparently considered continuity/canon. Even the bit with Devil Dinosaur at the end. That DD, however, was allegedly "a clone of Devil."


4.) Dick Ayers draws an awesome gorilla. Look at this thing, one of the "Beasts of Berlin" from Tales to Astonish #60:
I like how fast and rough the art is. It looks like Ayers drew it from memory, rather than photoreference, and came up with something that looks awfully close to a gorilla, without being too faithful to what gorillas actually look like.


5.) The Montauk Monster is obviously a relation to Droog, Russian scientist The Gremlin's bioenginnered dog.




6.) The Punisher used to have a dog, with a Punisher logo dog-chain. In the handbook's introduction, it is noted that "the notion of a super-pet—one who shares teh powers/appearance of its master–is particular to the publications of a certain Distinguished Competitor." Superboy had Krypto the Super-Dog and Beppo the Super-monkey, Supergirl had Streaky the Super-cat and Comet the Super-horse, Batman had Ace the Bat-Hound. There are a few of those sorts of pet analogue super-pets in the Marvel Universe, including Speedball's cat Niels/Hairball and The Sentry's Watchdog (although the Sentry is simply a Superman stand-in). If you would have asked me a couple weeks ago who the last Marvel character who would keep a dog version of himself around might be, I probably would have said The Punisher.
But I would have been wrong. Apparently in the early '90s Frank Castle rescued "a particularly savage rottweiler" named Max from a drug dealer, nursed him back to health, gave him a Punisher branded collar, and used him as a watchdog.

I don't think Punisher's Max ever appeared in the Punisher MAX title, but I still have a few trades to go before I finish that series. Maybe someday someone will do a Max MAX series...


7.) Loki is a lot weirder than I thought. I probably knew this at one point, back when I was a kid and would read encylopedias of Norse or Greek myths from the library, but Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir has a pretty weird parentage. Apparently the Big O wagered Freya in a bet against a frost giant who disguised himself as a stonemason. Loki knew that the giant's horse did most of the work, so to stop the giant from successfully rebuilding Asgard's walls in the bet-upon time-period, Loki "took the form of a young mare, and lured the stallion away...when Loki returned, he brought with him an eight-legged colt."

Soooo apparently Loki's tricky plan to stop the work was to transform himself into a female horse, let another horse fuck him, and then give birth to the baby horse he got knocked up with while seducing the giant's horse...?


8.) There are half-gorilla, half-lion monsters in both the DC Universe and the Marvel Universe:




9.) The Nazis were so evil and so monstrous, that even their pets were evil monsters.
Even the one's with femine names. (Or does "Teena" mean "Eight-legged Death" in German?)


10.) There is a ton of potential for future Lockjaw and The Pet Avengers sequels, if the first series sells well. A trip to asgard alone would supply Lockjaw and company plenty of animals to meet, team-up with or butt heads against. And there are more than enough pets of super-villains for The Pet Avengers to come into conflict with The Pet Masters of Evil.